They'd Rather Be Right (10 page)

Outside his windows, the elm trees rustled in the rising breeze of night. It had grown quite dark. Yet, there in the distance down the hill, was the glow of a light. It was a flickering, leaping, orange light, in the direction of the library park. The light grew brighter in the darkness—as if flames were mounting. Faintly, on the rising wind, there came the murmur of a crowd noise.

He wondered, idly, what the occasion was among the villagers, what they were celebrating, what was the reason for such a huge bonfire. For some strange reason, the placard lines leaped into his consciousness. He connected the lines, the bonfire, with the radio speech.

His head slumped forward on the desk.

He did not hear the door open, or see Joe’s grin fade to quick concern. Quickly Joe darted across the room, felt Billings’ pulse, put his ear to Billings’ chest and heard the heart still beat.

“Just fainted,” Joe said to Hoskins, who had come in behind him. “We’ll have to carry him. We can’t wait any longer.”

“Fool thing to delay this long,” Hoskins grumbled. “Don’t know why you stalled, Joe.”

“He had to grow up,” Joe said cryptically, and began massaging the flesh at the back of Billing’s neck.

Billings came out of his shock coma at the handling, and stiffened his head.

“That’s better,” Joe grinned. “Come on. Let’s get him out of here. We’ve got work to do. Science isn’t licked yet, not by any means.” He turned to Hoskins. “You sure you’ve smuggled all of Bossy’s parts out of here safely?”

“Sure, I’m sure,” Hoskins grinned back at him. “You sure you’ve got a safe hiding place for us?”

“Sure, I’m sure,” Joe said.

Billings stood up then, and suddenly he was quite strong.

“All right, Joe.” Billings shook his head dazedly. “Making a mistake isn’t too bad, I guess—if you live long enough to learn from it, and do something about it. Science has had a lot of knowledge, but mighty little understanding.

“Let’s go find out what
that
is.”

Part 2: “Bossy”

Just ahead, on Third Street, the massive facade of San Francisco’s Southern Pacific depot loomed, half hidden in the swirling fog and January twi-light. Joe Carter pulled his rented pickup truck to the now deserted curb, and squinted appraisingly into the gloom. The warning had come, the usual tingling up and down his spine, the drawing sensation at the nape of his neck.

He sent an expanding wave-field ahead of him, a telepathic inquiry, but there were too many people around the depot for him to sort out the specific source of danger without first knowledge of a focal point. The static of general anxiety, grief and gladness, which always seems to hang over a depot like a pall of smoke, prevented him from finding any menace directed to-ward himself.

And on the outside of the depot the scene was quite normal. The blurred yellow lights of a taxi pulled out of its reserved section and turned down Townsend Street toward the Embarcadero. The muffled rumble of traffic on the long overhead approach to the Bay Bridge was an audible accompaniment to the esper hum of half vocalized words and phrases picked up from the minds of the people all about the area.

He watched a police car cruise slowly by and disappear into the fog. He sampled the stream of consciousness of the two officers. Their casual glance has registered him in their minds: male truck driver, white, about twenty-two, no obvious disfigurements, not breaking any law at the moment. But there was no recognition.

He swept the street again with his physical eyes, and almost passed over the skid-row wino who had drifted a little far south of the usual haunts. The fellow had stopped in the chill shelter of a darkened store front, and was apparently drinking with desperate thirst from a wine bottle held in a paper sack. It was so usual, so completely in character, that Joe very nearly made the mistake of not penetrating. But even as he started to flick his eyes onward, his nape muscles contracted more sharply, heightening the awareness of danger.

Still doubting that the somatic price he must pay for sharing the wino’s hopelessness and dejection would be worth some bit of factual information drenched in it, Joe pierced.

He got a series of photographs, sharp and clear.

The Federal agent’s disguise was near perfection. Joe chuckled silently, with genuine amusement. In rinsing the wine in his mouth to give him a breath, just in case some other bum stumbled up to him, the agent had inadvertently swallowed a slug of the cheap stuff.

With him, and as clearly, Joe felt the somatic effect of the wine in the man’s nose, mouth, throat and stomach.

But the agent’s disgust did not wash out the domi-nant picture in his mind. He had recently been briefed, and his upper stream of consciousness still carried the conceptual images.

Two more agents were inside the depot; one of them standing near the line of people waiting to get tickets validated; the other reading a newspaper over near the hallway which led to the rest rooms.

Within easy vision of both sat their quarry, Professors Billings and Hoskins. Billings had been recognized at the depot in St. Louis where he was changing trains in his flight across the country.

Hoskins had not been discovered at all until he had joined Billings less than half an hour ago. There was elation in the agent’s mind over the meeting, for it might mean that the end of the long trail was near.

Obviously, the two men were now waiting for someone else to join them.

And when someone joined them, it was possible, unsuspectingly, they might lead the agents directly to Bossy.

Up until now there had been absolutely no indication of where the synthetic brain had been hidden.

There was disgust and contempt in the agent’s mind that during all the years that Hoxworth and other universities had been experimenting in the building of the cybernetic marvel, subsidized with government funds, Washington bureaucracy had not realized the significance of it. It had taken an uprising of the people, themselves, to drive home to Washington how man would react to the destruction of all his previous concepts on how the human mind worked and the values it assumed were absolute.

Someone had said then that this machine was more important than the atomic bomb had been forty years ago; that the implosion of its significance upon man’s psyche might do what the atomic bombs could not do; that man has a way of surviving physical destruction, but there was a large question of whether he could survive self-knowledge.

“You are so right,” Joe murmured, and lit a cigarette to heighten the impression that he had stopped to rest his shoulders and neck from arduous driving.

The agents’ orders were quite clear. Professors Hoskins and Billings were the central figures in developing the synthetic mind. The trail of these two men, sooner or later, would lead to Bossy. Until then, they were to keep the two professors under unsuspected surveil-lance; were not to concentrate enough agents to arouse suspicion; were to make an arrest only if the actions of the two men forced their hand.

Joe drew on his cigarette, and probed to a deeper level. He found what he wanted. The agent was tired, and he was chilled. He doubted that his stakeout position was necessary. The reports were that old Professor Billings, at least seventy-two, was as naive as a child; that he couldn’t elude the typical Junior G-Man, age six. And the agent’s stomach was beginning to feel queasy from the raw wine he had swallowed.

He was tired, he was chilled, he was queasy. Joe tied himself into the somatic discomfort, intensified it in himself, fed back the intensified dissatisfaction; picked it up again; oscillated it back and forth between them on feedback principle, stepped up each time—in the way he had watched mob reactions heighten far beyond the capacity of any isolated individual—and waited.

The man began to look down the street toward a small restaurant. He was growing ill. Perhaps the wine had poisoned him. There was the fleeting glimpse of wonder if he would be included on the roster of those killed in pursuit of duty. There was the rational denial of the urge of self-pity. There was the compromise to get a cup of coffee first, to see if that would break the chill, rest him, settle his stomach.

But, undoubtedly, this was that extreme situation which would justify his leaving his post of duty.

By the time Joe had meshed the gears of his truck to pull away from the curb, the agent was already halfway down the block, hurrying to the restaurant, still clutching the neck of the wine bottle in the paper sack. In case he did die, it might be valuable evidence.

Without more care than an ordinary truck driver would show, Joe drove the pickup into one of the loading docks on the far side of the station. He willed away the last sympathetic waves of nausea from his own stomach, and climbed nimbly up on the ramp. He strolled, without appearing to be in any hurry, through the door marked with the sign of Railway Express.

The clerk looked him over, took in the greasy leather jacket, the oil-stained jeans, the crumpled cap with the cracked visor.

“Yeah?” the clerk challenged. “What do you want?”

“Pickup for Brown Appliance Company,” Joe answered easily. “Crate of television parts.” No flash of alertness, suspicion, was evident in the clerk’s mind. It was confirmation that no one knew of Bossy.

He handed the clerk the shipping bill he had obtained when he forwarded the parts of Bossy from a town a hundred miles away from Hoxworth.

“No such package here,” the clerk said automatically. There was no real animosity in his voice or his mind. It was the simple desire to obstruct found in everyone, and often expressed where there is no fear of retaliation.

“Boss called the day crew,” Joe said dryly. “They said it was here. Suppose you get the lead out and find it.

The clerk looked at him levelly and curled his lip in a slight sneer. If this punk’s boss had called and got the manager during the day, there might be a stink. He decided to cooperate. He found the crate in the back room, slipped the blade of the hand truck beneath its edge, grumbled at how heavy and bulky it was, and wheeled it out on the loading dock. To his own surprise, he found himself helping Joe load it carefully into the bed of the pickup.

Joe walked back into the office with the clerk. “Boss wants me to get a ticket to L.A.,” Joe said.

“Where do I do that?”

“In there,” the clerk said and jabbed a finger toward the door leading to the waiting room of the depot. “You want me to lead you by the hand?”

“No,” Joe answered. “Don’t like to get my hand dirty.”

He walked on through the door and down the corridor which led to the depot waiting room. He knew that the clerk was standing behind his counter with his jaw hanging down and his mouth open. The clerk’s shock of being bested at his own game gave Joe the somatic hook he needed to blur the image of himself in the clerk’s mind. In spite of the repartee, he would not be remembered. As any courtroom knows, emotional disturbance can call up wildly inaccurate descriptions. Already the clerk was remembering him as a hulking brute of a truck driver with coarse black hair, wide flaring ears and tobacco juice stains on his chin.

At the corridor entrance to the waiting room, Joe paused, and with both psionic and visual sight picked out the two professors. Their disguises were simple, and still intact. The seventy-two-year-old Billings had had the distinguishing mane of white hair cut short and dyed black. The elaborate gold pince-nez on the flowing black ribbon had been replaced with garden variety horn rims. His clothes were cheap and nondescript. But far more than such superficialities, Joe had counted on the change in the man’s bearing to keep his identity secret. Gone was the assurance of the world-famous figure, known to every child through picture, cartoon, newsreel, the renowned Dean of Psychosomatic Medicine at Hoxworth University. In its place was hurt, bewilderment, incredulity—a lost and tired old man. Even so, he had been recognized and followed here.

Professor Hoskins, at forty, with even less change in his appearance had not been recognized before joining Billings.

The two of them sat there now, according to plan, waiting for Joe to join them, to tell them what they must do next.

And with the wino agent’s mentations as a focal guide, Joe had no difficulty in picking out their two watchers. These two were also nondescript in appearance. They waited patiently, as might well-domesti-cated husbands waiting for wives, without either calling attention to themselves, or avoiding it.

Joe’s lips twitched in a smile, and he took advantage of their natural wish to relieve their boredom.

The one with the newspaper signaled the other with his eyes that a conference was necessary. Aimlessly, they drifted together near the entrance to the depot. One followed the other out the door, and together they walked up the street toward a restaurant.

With no surprise at all, they joined their fellow agent in the wino disguise, and the three of them sat discussing their quarry, speculating on who was to contact the professors, and when the trail might lead to Bossy. The wino agent had recovered his feeling of well-being with astonishing rapidity, concluded he had just been momentarily chilled. He didn’t bother to mention why they had found him there, and it did not occur to them to ask.